The Worst Movies of 2016

There were a lot of great movies in 2016. There were! Please don’t let this list convince you otherwise. The movies were absolutely wonderful this year. Just not these specific movies. These were bad. So, so, so bad. Just awful.

As we wind down our coverage of the best of 2016, we’ve come at last to the worst movies of the year. These ten films, selected by ScreenCrush’s editors — Britt Hayes, Matt Singer, and Erin Whitney — represented the dregs of the dregs of the recent cinematic calendar (with five more dishonorable mentions included at the bottom). Our two wishes for you this holiday season are for world peace and for you to never have to sit through any of these. Or, if you did sit through them already, that the memory of the experience fades away quickly. (Except for Collateral Beauty. We’re going to talk about that movie for decades.)

2016: The year of peak sequel, the year of crappy summer movies, and the year we had to watch another makeup-clad Johnny Depp character, only this one is mopey and depressed. James Bobin’s Alice Through the Looking Glass is an utterly superfluous sequel with a terrible premise. Mia Wasikowska’s Alice returns to Underland to travel back in time and save the Mad Hatter’s family, which will put all of Underland in jeopardy. If your first movie is about a heroine saving a magical world from destruction and the follow-up is about her risking those same people’s lives to help cheer up one sad dude, you’ve got a problem. It also didn’t help that Looking Glass lacked the detailed visual spectacle that made Burton’s first film bearable. If you thought the first live-action Alice was bad, just imagine what this was like. — Erin Whitney

One of the saddest cinematic trends of 2016 was funny people churning out hideously unfunny comedies. There’s a couple examples on this list, but maybe none more depressing than The Boss, featuring the sublime Melissa McCarthy as the loathsome Michelle Darnell, an obnoxious CEO who loses everything and then tries to start over with the assistance of a former employee (Kristen Bell) and her dynamite brownie recipe. Darnell is an eye-catching character design in search of an actual character; she’s just a jerk and her clichéd redemption arc doesn’t jive at all with her behavior (which mostly involves yelling at children and exploiting them for cheap labor). Darnell was an orphan, and in learning to play well with others, The Boss imparts a lesson about the joys of family, something that surely means a lot to McCarthy and her husband Ben Falcone, who directed The Boss and co-wrote the screenplay with her. But the main message I took from The Boss was that even a brilliant performer like McCarthy can only do so much with bad jokes. — Matt Singer

Trailers for Collateral Beauty made it look like a treacly Christmas movie, but the reality was so much worse than that. In fact, Collateral Beauty was a tale of corporate greed packaged as a treacly Christmas movie by treating its tale of three ad executives gaslighting their grieving partner (Will Smith at his least Will Smith-y) as a heroic act instead of a despicable betrayal. Those trailers made it seem like Will Smith’s Howard is actually visited by the embodiments of love, time, and death, but right from the start the movie makes it clear they’re just actors hired by his horrible friends. That might be the worst Colalteral Beauty deception of all: Suckering moviegoers into buying tickets with the promise of a heartwarming holiday cheer. — MS

Dirty Grandpa is certainly offensive, or at least it has all the superficial ingredients to make something offensive: Robert De Niro happily dropping the N-word during a karaoke performance of Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day,” De Niro masturbating, De Niro shoving his genitals in his grandson’s (Zac Efron) face. Okay, that litany of offenses isn’t really fair because it makes it sound as though De Niro is the only one who gets to have any “fun”; there is a moment, after all, when Aubrey Plaza, unapologetically determined to sleep with De Niro, tells him to “tsunami” on her face. All of these jokes could be offensive, but the really insulting part of Dirty Grandpa is that director Dan Mazer and writer John Phillips so desperately want them to be. There’s something to be said for a comedy that zeroes in on the boundaries of good taste and tramples all over them. Dirty Grandpa just wags its weiner around like an obnoxious teenage boy, convinced everyone will think it’s hilarious just because he does. — Britt Hayes

Don’t be fooled by Emily Blunt’s SAG Award nomination – The Girl on the Train is terrible. The adaptation of Paula Hawkins’ best seller isn’t even so-bad-it’s-good, but rather a boring collection of over-acting, poor filmmaking, and glorified violence against women. Tate Taylor (The Help, Get On Up) directs some very talented actors – Blunt, Justin Theroux, and Rebecca Ferguson, among others – to career-worst performances. Blunt occasionally approaches a poignant moment, but quickly reverts to a parody of drunkenness. This film thinks it’s erotic, with close-up shots of Haley Bennett’s lingerie and steamy sex scenes. (It’s not.) It thinks it’s crafty as it jumps between perspectives, a gimmick ripped straight from Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. It trivializes alcoholism and normalizes domestic abuse for theatrics. Worst of all, it wastes Lisa Kudrow. No one should be allowed to waste Lisa Kudrow. — EW

Consider me one of the few (and the not-so-proud) sold on the delightfully silly premise of the Independence Day sequel, which looked like more than your average Roland Emmerich disaster pic: A sci-fi B-movie dressed up as a big budget blockbuster — you know, sort of like his first Independence Day. Even without Will Smith, Independence Day: Resurgence had plenty of solid components, including the returns of Brent Spiner, Judd Hirsch, Bill Pullman, and Jeff Goldblum (in a space suit on the moon, no less). But not even that quartet, nor the great Charlotte Gainsbourg, nor the inclusion of the inexplicable astro-military nutritional supplement known as Moon Milk, could redeem this long-awaited sequel, which is remarkably boring. For a film that boasts a massive alien invasion (literally massive; the Queen Alien is like the Godzilla of these guys), Space Suit Goldblum, and a cameo from long-haired hippy Brent Spiner’s rear end, ID:R is stupefyingly, relentlessly tedious, embodied by co-star Liam Hemsworth, who has all the charisma of flattened cardboard boxes in a liquor store dumpster. — BH

Masterminds is a movie in which Zach Galifianakis gets explosive diarrhea in a resort swimming pool. If you find that concept funny, perhaps you’ll disagree with this statement: Masterminds is garbage. I can get down with some potty humor (I grew up watching ’90s Adam Sandler movies, after all), but Masterminds is so painfully dense, gross, and childish that the only emotion you’ll feel watching it is embarrassment. It also stars Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones, but not even the Ghostbusters gang can salvage it. Wiig plays her most uninteresting character to date, while McKinnon and Jones do their usual schtick without the screen time necessarily to deliver anything memorable. The true bank robbery the film is based on is a fascinating story; even criminals deserve a better cinematic retelling than this. — EW

Let’s not pretend that Suicide Squad had all the ingredients for a good film in the first place: Jared Leto as the Joker (and that was before we fully understood the horrible extent of what that would mean), a bajillion characters with no franchise pretext, and Jai Courtney as ... well, Jai Courtney as anything, really. It’s not that Suicide Squad is disappointing; it’s hard to be disappointed in something when your expectations are already so low. But it still should have been easier for Ayer and company to surprise us, especially with charisma machines like Will Smith and Margot Robbie (the film’s sole bright spot) leading the charge. It’s hard to fault Ayer too much, given highly-publicized reports that Warner Bros. cut and tested their own competing version of the film. No wonder the end result was a tonally and narratively incoherent mess. Suicide Squad is so disastrous Roland Emmerich should make a movie about it. —BH

I have seen the first Zoolander at least a dozen times, maybe more. It’s endlessly rewatchable, and delightfully subversive in its satirical assault on the fashion industry. I saw Zoolander 2 once earlier this year; if I’m lucky, I’ll never see it again. This tragic waste of talent reunited most of the original film’s core cast, including Owen Wilson, Will Ferrell, and, of course, co-writer/director Ben Stiller as the endearingly dopey Derek Zoolander, for a repellent misadventure through the world of modern male modeling. I’m used to Zoolander looking clueless, but Stiller has rarely seemed this lost as a filmmaker. He had 15 years to think of a compelling reason why this movie should exist. He never did. — MS